I had to pick C, because of my fun MUD-coding experiences. Sure, it's not very OOP, and it's got a polluted namespace like you wouldn't believe, and uses linked lists from hell, but it's so much fun to play in MUD code, especially when a 'feature' nukes some player you didn't like by accident. ;)

However, I did almost pick BASIC. On my first personal computer, this ancient Epson (8086, 2 5.25" drives, no HD), I had GWBASIC. GWBASIC was interesting - it didn't have some things that QBASIC does that I liked, and so couldn't take some of the games I found for QBASIC over to GWBASIC, but I found a neat feature that it had.

GWBASIC had a command called play. It took a string which consisted of note names, I could put a dot after the letter to represent the musical dot notation, I could use a > to go up an octave (and < to go down an octave) etc - it was a blast.

Before I found play, I'd written generic little games here and there, like hangman, but with play, I added music to my games.

I even wrote my own screen saver (like I really needed one). I used my first song, Mary Had A Little Lamb (arguably the "Hello World!" of the music world), and also set it to take the simple lyrics and scroll them across my screen randomly, creating a snow-like effect of words set to music.

I still have all of my GWBASIC code sitting on some 5.25" disks in my mother's storage shed - I should go get those, find an old drive, and check it out again. hehe.

I liked Qbasic over GWBasic when it came out, eventually BasicPDS was the cream of the crop because it compiled exe's the size of C compiled code. Compared to C, C was only a tad faster with string manips. The core compiler for BasicPDS was C based. I still remember writing ISAM apps, better than the other DB's at the time. Then came VB, hated VB for DOS, but VB was ok.

I still think back to the days of my C64 and C128, using Basic 2.0 and Basic 7.0, although 7.0 was very much like Simon's BASIC which was really good. I miss the monitor tool to look at live memory, and see how the code looks in memory. :) Man, ever wonder how many hundreds or thousands of programs and scripts you ever wrote over the years.

I've been working with Perl for about 2 years, and it's become my new love. :P I do ALMOST everything in Perl! The syntax in Perl is also helping me learn C.

I gave up on VB when 6.0 came out - I was so disgusted I deleted from the drive, and started learning Perl,SQL, and C/C++.

I'm still trying to understand the niche for pointers in C. Maybe one day they will click. As for the syntax, syntax is syntax.. once you got the logic, any language becomes fun.